July 4, 2018

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Huawei might be making a powerful phone for mobile gamers

by John_A

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Razer wasn’t being crazy when it made the gaming-focused Razer Phone — turns out it was ahead of the curve, and making a smartphone that’s optimized for games is apparently the new hotness, with both the Asus ROG Phone and the Red Magic Phone on the horizon. Huawei is apparently looking to be the latest addition to that list, and rumors say that the Chinese company will be looking to release a gaming-themed smartphone. While details are scarce, here’s everything we know about Huawei’s gaming phone.

Software

It’s safe to expect that Huawei’s proprietary software will feature heavily in this phone, and we expect the recently released GPU Turbo addition will play a central role in keeping this gaming phone ticking. According to Huawei, GPU Turbo will boost the gaming efficiency of Huawei’s Kirin chips by 60 percent, while also cutting battery consumption by a third. That makes for impressive reading, and according to some sources, Huawei will be further optimizing and advancing that same tech for its gaming phone.

What could that mean for Huawei’s gaming phone? We haven’t had chance to get our hands on the GPU Turbo update yet, but if it’s anywhere near as a revolutionary as Huawei claims it to be, and can make a mid-range phone pulls the sorts of framerates you’re more used to seeing on a flagship device, then seeing it used on a device made just for gaming could be incredible.

Specs

As you might expect from a gaming-focused device, Huawei’s gaming phone is likely to have some pretty impressive specs. It’s safe to expect that it will either equal or exceed the specs of the Asus ROG Phone, and since that includes the extremely powerful Snapdragon 845 and 8GB of RAM, that’s already plenty powerful.

Since the Huawei gaming phone is expected in the later months of 2018 at the very earliest, it’s possible that the phone will come packed with a newly upgraded version of Huawei’s proprietary Kirin processor. The Kirin 970 chip, used on the Huawei P20 Pro, is already pretty darn powerful, sitting between the Snapdragon 835 and 845 in terms of benchmarking results, and delivering strong performance. An upgraded version of the Kirin chip could be enough to top the Snapdragon 845 in terms of raw power, and deliver a show-stopping performance.

Release date and price

Like most of this phone, we don’t know a huge amount about the planned release date yet. According to an interview with Huawei Consumer Business President Jim Xu, Huawei is aiming to have this phone released by the second half of 2018. That’s a pretty big ballpark, and considering we’re already more than halfway through the year already, it might be safe to assume that it’ll be further towards the tail end of the year.

We know even less about the planned price. Since it’s likely to be a device with high-end specifications, it’s not unfair to expect this device to push into the upper echelons of flagship pricing — $800-$900 might not be far off.

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